Blog Archives
Election 2012 – A Personal View
Are you getting ready to cast your vote?
Consider the following.
No candidate appears to be addressing the real issues namely the Financial Institutions and Jobs.
At the end of the day health care, immigration, and storms are only side issues.
The two real topics that should be screaming forth from the headline news should be unemployment and control over the financial Institutions.
Have the media failed the people concerning these issues. If so, is this due to the malignant lure of campaign funds to fill the publishers coffers.
Do you know the wise guys of banking have received more money in bailouts than has been spent on the wars in Iraq and Iran? All presidents are complicit in doling money your money into these wealth-sucking leeches.
Your next president will be no different he will feed the parasites.
The lesson learned from all of this is the President no longer represents the people. His sole duty appears to be to protect the wealth vampires and the military/industrial complex, the soldiers of destruction. Poor old Johnny Taxpayer must put his hand in the pocket for all the fraud committed by these smart-ass thugs. It seems to me not just in America, but everywhere the dissonant echoes of this story connect with the corridors of authority worldwide.
The most depressing think about this election is you cannot even pick the lesser of two evils
The craziest, most nail-biting elections in U.S. history
In case you haven’t been paying attention: The presidential election is shaping up to be very, very, very close. The scenarios are mind-boggling. One possibility: Mitt Romney could win the popular vote but lose what counts: the electoral college. It would be fitting revenge for Democrats still angry about the Bush-Gore debacle from 2000. The opposite could also occur: Obama, popular in voter-rich California, New York, and Illinois, could win the most votes but be edged out in the electoral college.
Perhaps the craziest of all is the possibility of Romney and Biden winning. You heard that right: a Romney-Biden administration. Imagine, if you will, that Obama and Romney wind up with an electoral college tie of 269-269 (a very slim possibility). It takes 270 to win. So what happens?
The House of Representatives decides. Under Article 12 of the Constitution, each state gets one vote, according to which party dominates that state’s House delegation. There are more Democrats in California’s House delegation, and more Republicans in Texas’, for example. And so forth.Since more state delegations in the House are controlled by Republicans, there’s no question who they’d award the presidency to: Mitt Romney.
But the VP would be picked by the Senate. And the Senate is controlled — and is likely to be controlled after election day — by the Democrats. Who would they vote for? You guessed it: Joe Biden.
Bizarre (or hilarious) as that would be, it would hardly be unprecedented. The election of 1800 was equally screwy, and the contests of 1824 and 1876 were also ones for the books. All three make the 2000 mess seem almost like a picnic. Judge for yourself:
1800: Thomas Jefferson vs. Aaron Burr
In the early days of the republic, electors each cast not one, but two electoral votes for president. Adding to the confusion: There was no such thing as “election day” as we know it now. States voted whenever they felt like it over a period running from April to October. It was a long, drawn-out, and often confusing process.
The republic was just 24 years old when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr squared off against President John Adams and Charles Pickney. Yet electors gave both Jefferson and Burr — who were on the same ticket — 73 electoral votes apiece. Adams got 65, and Pickney 64.
So what do you do in the event of a tie? The Constitution said the House of Representatives would decide. Since Jefferson and Burr got the most electoral votes, the former running mates suddenly became rivals. Voting went on for days, with ballot after ballot. Finally, after 36 ballots, the tie was broken: Thomas Jefferson was declared the president-elect. Aaron Burr was declared vice president. But Jefferson, at this point, didn’t trust Burr and gave him nothing to do.
In an unrelated matter, by the way, Burr later shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary, in a duel.
1824: John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson
Jackson (you know him from the $20 bill) crushed John Quincy Adams, the son of our second president, John Adams, in both the popular vote (41 percent to 31 percent) and in the electoral college (99 to 84). Yet Adams won. How could Adams lose both the popular vote and electoral college yet win the White House?
Unfortunately for “Old Hickory,” as Jackson was known, there were two other men on the presidential ballot in 1824: William Crawford of Georgia, who received 41 electoral votes, and Henry Clay of Kentucky, who got 37. Because the four men received a combined 271 electoral votes, Jackson had a plurality but not a majority. He needed 136, but had only 99.
Once again, it was up to the House. Because the 12th Amendment to the Constitution said that only the top three presidential candidates could be considered, Clay was out. He threw his support to Adams, and on Feb. 9, 1825, the House gave Adams 138 electoral votes. John Quincy Adams — loser of both the popular vote and, at first, the electoral college — would become the sixth president of the United States.
Now, a story like this can’t be told without a little dirt. After all, it’s presidential politics. Just before the results of the House election became public, an anonymous letter appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper. Said to be from a member of Congress, it accused Clay of selling his support to Adams if Adams made Clay secretary of State. Jackson and his supporters were outraged over what they called “the corrupt bargain.”
Clay did indeed become secretary of State in the Adams administration.
This is also a cautionary tale. You’ve got to be careful what you wish for. John Quincy Adams hated being president. He called it the “four most miserable years of my life.” One reason: He was hounded at every turn by Jackson and his supporters. In 1828, both would clash again when Adams sought re-election. This time, Jackson got his revenge, crushing Adams in both the popular vote and winning a majority of the electoral college. Adams later spent 17 years in Congress — the only president to do so after leaving the White House.
1876: Samuel Tilden vs. Rutherford Hayes
It happened again: A candidate lost after getting the most popular votes and the most electoral votes on election day.
In addition to snagging 51 percent of the popular vote, New York Gov. Samuel Tilden (D) won 184 electoral votes — one short of winning the White House. His rival, Ohio Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes (R), won just 48 percent of the vote and 165 electoral votes. Here’s the catch: Twenty other electoral votes in several states were disputed and went uncounted. The states: Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon.
In all three southern states, it looked like Tilden won the popular vote. But there were allegations of fraud (ink-smeared ballots and bribery) and voter intimidation. Chaos ensued. In Florida, for example, the Republicans said they won by 922 votes. Democrats say they did — by 94 votes.
Meantime, in Oregon, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that Hayes won the state. But when the Democratic governor found out one Republican member of the electoral college was a federal worker (a postmaster) and ineligible to serve, he replaced him with a Democrat. The Republican elector promptly resigned his post office job and said that as a private citizen, he would cast his electoral college vote for Hayes.
All four states submitted two sets of electoral vote counts each to Congress, all with different results. To untangle the mess, Congress set up an electoral commission: five members of the House, five members of the Senate, and five Supreme Court Justices.
By the way, there’s absolutely nothing in the Constitution saying this is how an election standoff was to be resolved. After much maneuvering, the commission voted along party lines — 8 to 7 — to award the disputed electoral votes, and the presidency, to Hayes.
But it still wasn’t over. Democrats threatened to filibuster the counting of electoral votes to keep Hayes from winning. In 1877 — just weeks before inauguration day — Democrats gave in, with one big string attached. Republicans must agree, they said, to withdraw all federal troops from the South. This was just a decade after the civil war. The GOP agreed — and thus the Compromise of 1877.
And you thought Bush-Gore was messy…
http://theweek.com/supertopic/election2012/93/2012+Elections
via The craziest, most nail-biting elections in U.S. history – The Week.
via The craziest, most nail-biting elections in U.S. history – The Week.
Mitt Romney Adviser Says Jeep Jobs Added In China Are Jobs Not Added In U.S.
WASHINGTON – When Mitt Romney told a crowd in Ohio last week that he had read a report saying Jeep was “thinking of moving all production to China,” there was at least a potentially defensible explanation.
A Bloomberg story published the previous Monday had stated that Fiat, which owns Chrysler, “plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually make all of its models in that country.”
A line was added to the Bloomberg story after it was published stating that Mike Manley, chief operating officer of Fiat and Chrysler in Asia, was referring to “adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.” The Romney campaign told The Huffington Post on Tuesday that the update was after Romney made his remark on Thursday. It’s not clear whether that’s true or not, but what is known is that Chrysler refuted press reports about the Bloomberg story before Romney spoke Thursday evening in Defiance, Ohio.
What has confounded many political observers, and provoked a spirited counteroffensive from the Obama campaign — including their own TV ad — is why the Romney campaign then aired in Ohio a TV commercial that implied the auto bailout had hurt the auto industry and that Chrysler was sending U.S. jobs to China. Chrysler told HuffPost the company has added 11,200 U.S. jobs since going through a managed bankruptcy backed by federal bailout dollars in late 2008 and early 2009. And while Chrysler is going to make Jeeps in China for the Chinese market rather than selling U.S.-built models in China, the company said it is expanding production rather than shifting it, adding shifts and hiring workers in the U.S. at the same time.
via Mitt Romney Adviser Says Jeep Jobs Added In China Are Jobs Not Added In U.S..
via Mitt Romney Adviser Says Jeep Jobs Added In China Are Jobs Not Added In U.S..